1. Introduction

A cluster is two or more interconnected computers that create a solution to provide high availability, high scalability or both.

The advantage of clustering computers for high availability is seen if one of these computers fails, another computer in the cluster can then consume the workload of the failed computer. Users of the system see no interruption of access.

Cluster reduces unplanned service outages and planned outages for software and hardware maintenance and upgrades. This ensures that all services are available to users without any interruption.

This document helps providing an easy and user friendly means to setup a Cluster Environment for ZENworks Linux Management, FTP, HTTP, Samba servers, etc. which are basically related to a Linux platform.

2. Minimum System Requirements

Three server class machines:

Software requirements:

One SLES 10 (This would be used as Cluster Target. In a typical Customer deployment this can be a shared Memory).

Two SLES 9SP3 (This would be used as Cluster Nodes).

3. Installation

Before installation of target on the machine, make sure that you have enough space to configure a common storage device. This machine will act as a target.

3.1 SLES 10 Installation (Target)

Install the SLES 10 server on the new hardware and select the following packages.

Open iscsi.conf file on Linux server and enter Discovery address and Target name. Discovery address is the IP address of NetWare server (iSCSI target) and target name is the name of iSCSI as shown above.

Open iSCSI initiator file by executing vi /etc/initiatorname.iscsi and specify the DNS name of target i.e SLES 10 for the InitiatorName . parameter.

vi /etc/initiatorname.iscsi

Example:

InitiatorName=systst-zen-57.blr.novell.com

Step 3:

Start ISCSI on Linux servers.

On Linux terminal type /etc/init.d/iscsi start

In the Popup click YES to start ISCSI on Linux servers.

Select iSCSI partition and create ext3 file system and give about 8GB size. Select Format but don’t configure mount point. Leave mount point as blank. (If you configure mount point, entry will be made in fstab and partition will be mounted automatically after system reboots).

6. Configuring Clustering Services on SLES 9.x Linux

We have to perform the steps below on both of the nodes:

Install heartbeat on both the nodes

Select High-Availability packages at the time of installation

or when you run the steps below it will ask for installation, just press continue.

Disclaimer: As with everything else at SUSE Conversations, this content is definitely not supported by SUSE (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up). It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.